Running for Your Life: Physics? Really?

You never know when it’s going to happen.

An insight. The charge that breaks up the logjam.

It’s why I read. And read.

Not as an completist. As in, start something and take it to the end every time.

I’ll skim so much. Content being what it is. Pure surface, if you can handle that oxymoron.

The other day Pankaj Mishra wrote what I thought would be a throwaway review of a book of canned essays by Ta-Nehishi Coates. It wasn’t.

Rather, Mishra’s piece was a clear light of intellectual radiance. It is called, “Why Do White People Like What I Write?” and yes, it was a review/essay in the London Review of Books, my readers’ guide to our cockeyed galaxy.

I won’t reprint it here. Look it up and do so yourself. Or don’t. It’s all the same to me.

Know this, though. That reading Mishra (yes, I did a blog post in praise of Mishra’s “Age of Anger” book last June) gives me the clearest explanation of why it is I find myself so disgusted by and dismissive of politics and corporate journalism that I long for something better to feed my brain.

Thus, physics and maths. Here in the past few months I’ve started (and finished!) the following titles:’

• ·        Innumeracy by John Allen Paulos

• ·        A Brief History of Time by Stephen Hawking

• ·        The Jazz of Physics by Stephon Alexander

• ·        Reality Is Not What It Seems by Carlo Rovelli

And a few years ago, a book I return to:

• ·        Ripples on a Cosmic Sea by David Blair and Geoff McNamara

And a favorite,

• ·        Everything and More: A Compact History of Infinity by David Foster Wallace

Read pure and applied science. Make calculations. Get excited about something real! Something divinely human! Throw off the cynicism! Be great again!

Next: Running for Your Life: On Going Long